This afternoon, President Barack Obama pledged to veto Republican poison-pill legislation to to shortcut the approval process for the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. “Any effort to try to tie Keystone to the payroll tax cut I will reject,” President Barack Obama said in a press conference with Canada Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who supports connecting Canada’s tar sands to Texas refineries. “If the payroll tax cut is attached to a whole bunch of extraneous issues, then it’s not something that I’m going to accept.” (HT: Andrew Restuccia)